The Viktor Bout Refugee Rescue Committee

Until recently, the only thing that could be said in favor of our treatment of former Iraqi employees was that the Brits were no better. I’m afraid we’ve lost that small comfort and now stand alone as the world’s worst betrayers of friends and allies. Last month, according to the Daily Mail, the British government agreed to begin a multi-million-dollar airlift from Iraq to the U.K. of Iraqi employees and their families “in groups of 100 every fortnight until the autumn.” The decision didn’t come easily. Last year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown refused to grant sanctuary to hundreds of endangered interpreters. The subsequent outcry in the U.K. included a YouTube ad and a grassroots Facebook campaign not unlike Kirk Johnson’s List Project. According to the Daily Mail, “The Government later bowed to pressure.”

What a thought! A campaign of concerned citizens leads to a change in a shameful government policy. I can almost remember when that might have happened in this country. Instead, legislation recently passed by Congress to expedite the resettlement of Iraqis and increase the number of former employees getting visas is now on hold as administration lawyers argue over language. I hear every week from American soldiers whose interpreters send them desperate S.O.S.s from Iraq, Jordan, and Syria while the bureaucratic gears turn so slowly that they’re losing hope.

Last week I cheered the arrest in Thailand of Viktor Bout, the international arms dealer. Nothing is morally simple in the age of global traffic and terror. In “Merchant of Death,” their book about Bout, Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun describe how his various air-cargo companies managed to secure a large piece of business flying arms into Baghdad after the American invasion, and how the Pentagon continued to overlook this embarrassment even as State and Treasury were trying to sanction Bout. Here’s a modest proposal, building on my Guam option: why don’t the American prosecutors eager to put Bout on trial cut a plea bargain in which he would use his worldwide cargo business to conduct an airlift like Britain’s (and Denmark’s last year), flying America’s Iraqi friends in his fleet of Antonovs and Ilyushins across the world to Guam for processing and eventual resettlement. It would be a kind of community service on Bout’s part, atonement for his large role in worldwide atrocities over the past fifteen years and the beginning of his rehabilitation. It would also give the U.S. government a way to make up for using Bout as an arms trafficker to Iraq. It would save taxpayer dollars. And finally, after a year of delay and failure by American officials, we’d have a man eminently capable of getting the job done.